Technology and Intelligence

Television and internet have clearly become major staples in our pop culture over the last fifty years. I don’t think they’ve destroyed Americans’ ability to read and think critically about ideas, but they have definitely changed the way we gather information. The easy-to-access information that television and (primarily) the internet have created, allow people to find what they’re looking for within a matter of seconds, rather than devoting vast time and energy to researching whatever subject they may be interested in. Could a lessening of in-depth and extensive data reflection have created a less intelligent society?

As writer, Nicholas Carr, states in his article Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains, “My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of worlds. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.” (Carr, Para. 4) He goes on to discuss the fact that he and acquaintances of his, “mainly literary types,” seem to have lost the attention span to become fully emerged in a book or extensive article; they merely “skim” through to find what they’re looking for. His belief is that this information overload is harming our ability to think. More specifically, that various aspects of the world-wide-web (e.g. hyperlinks, pop-ups, etc.) are creating continuous distraction and preventing deep contemplation, which in turn, is negatively rewiring our cognitive patterns.

While Carr raises a thought provoking argument, many disagree with his point of view. Jamais Cascio (writer and supporter of Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You), raised a conflicting argument in his article Get Smarter—which was released in the same publication. Cascio states, “[T]he proliferation of diverse voices may actually improve our overall ability to think,” (Cascio, Para. 11) to which he continues, “we shouldn’t let the stresses associated with a transition to a new era blind us to that era’s astonishing potential.” (Cascio, Para. 12)

Whether or not our modern technological age will dumb us down really depends on our ability to evolve into this information overload. We may not be submerging ourselves as frequently into a single source of information, but having access to multiple sources with the touch of a finger can allow for further discovery, which in turn, has the potential to act as a mind enhancing experience. Considering that the internet is certainly not going anywhere anytime soon, it’s important that we use critical thinking skills to consider how valuable the possibilities that this information flood can have on us (Critical Thinking, Pg. 160)

Ray Bradbury may have been partially right with his fear of “people being turned into morons by T.V.” but how these mediums affect our intelligence, and our society as a whole, is based on how we go about using them. Immersing ourselves into hours of brainless reality television obviously won’t have a positive impact on our culture, but there are ways of using these technologies to our advantage. If we are heading into a time when authorities burn books for our own good, it will be because they have become obsolete in comparison to the sea of information that the internet has given us. 

I was unable to embed this video into blogger, so here is a link to the Ray Bradbury interview that I took the above quote from: http://www.raybradbury.com/images/video/about_freeDOM.html